The inventive concept relates to data storage devices and data processing systems including at least one data storage device. More particularly, the inventive concept relates to data storage devices having a distributed scale-out structure, as well as data processing systems including this type of data storage device.
Memory devices are used to store digital data and may be classified as volatile or non-volatile according to their operative properties. In general, non-volatile memory devices are able to retain stored data in the absence of applied power. So-called flash memory is a particular type of non-volatile memory that is capable of being electrically erased and programmed. That is, a number of constituent flash memory cells may be electrically erased during a single erase operation, or electrically programmed during a single program operation.
Various digital drives, such as Solid State Drives (Disks) or SDDs, are configured using one or more non-volatile memory devices, e.g., one or more flash memory devices. However, previous attempts to substantially expand the data storage capacity of such drives essentially required the fixed addition of more non-volatile memory devices. And as the number of non-volatile memory devices included in various drives has increased, the size of associated mapping table(s) (e.g., such as mapping tables used to convert logical addresses into physical addresses) has also increased. This manifest relationship presents a significant hurtle, as increasingly large mapping tables tend to slow the overall performance of data processing systems.